Mother's Day photo special: Movie moms from hell

Handout, Files05.02.2011

Some moms you don't want to come home to.

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Bette Midler in Gypsy (1993). Midler delivers a powerhouse performance as the driven stage mother whose obsessions threaten to destroy the happiness of her two daughters. A stellar made-for-television version of the hit musical, and infinitely superior to the 1962 film starring Rosalind Russell.Handout
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Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest (1981). Grotesque and trashy though this film version of Christina Crawford's malicious tell-it-all book about mother Joan Crawford may be, you have to admit that you can't take your eyes off Faye Dunaway's demonic take on the purported nasty underside of one of Hollywood's most durable stars. Trouble is that Dunaway is so over the top that she may have caused huge damage to her career.Handout
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Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom (1994). So what if typical suburban mom Beverly Sutphin murders the teacher who criticizes her son's schoolwork and exterminates the guy who stood up her daughter on a date. Isn't Beverly just being a caring mother? This John Waters film is a subversive delight.Handout
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Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People (1980). Moore was seeking to break away from her lovable television image when she accepted a role in Robert Redford's directorial debut, and she succeeded with a vengeance. Critic David Denby calls her character “the ultimate Wasp movie bitch — the mother as Snow Queen and destroyer.”Handout
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Margaret Wycherly in White Heat (1949). As the mother of a vicious psychopathic gangster, this veteran actress had to hold her own against James Cagney's electrifying performance as the mother-fixated Cody Jarrett, a gangster who blows himself up at the end with the exultant cry: “Made it Ma! Top of the world!” But Wycherly exercises a weird compulsion throughout the film — no more so than in the remarkable moment when Cagney snuggles up on her lap. No other Hollywood actor would have had the nerve to do that on screen 62 years ago.Handout
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Melissa Leo in The Fighter (2010). American critic Rick Bentley wrote last year that Leo's Oscar-winning turn as aspiring boxer Mark Wahlberg's insanely possessive and domineering mother made Hollywood's previous monstrous moms seem as benign as June Cleaver.Handout
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The Alien Queen in Aliens (1986). Equally merciless at killing off a space settlement or eviscerating an entire platoon of Marines, this monstrous mother with the slavering fangs and slimy tentacles is determined to protect her eggs at all cost. Thank heaven for Sigourney Weaver's intrepid Warrant Officer Ripley.Handout
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Angela Lansbury In The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The scene where Lansbury's malevolent Washington matriarch invites tormented son and programmed killer Laurence Harvey to play a game of cards gives this paranoid Cold War thriller its most startling and chilling moment. Those who know Lansbury only for Murder She Wrote will be jolted by her venom.Handout
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Piper Laurie in Carrie (1976). Maternal fanaticism with puritan underpinnings: The psychosis of a mother so obsessed with sexual guilt that she considers the onset of puberty as a blood curse leads to psychosis (and worse) in daughter Sissy Spacek.Handout
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Mrs. Bates in Psycho (1960). This is the infernal mother who, in more ways than we want to imagine, made son Norman (Anthony Perkins) the troubled young man we encounter in Hitchcock's horror classic. Without her, Janet Leigh would never have died in that shower and a terrified Martin Balsam would never have fallen downstairs to his doom.Handout
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